Dr. Patricia Hill Collins

Union Institute & University is honored to welcome Dr. Patricia Hill Collins as the keynote speaker at the 2019 January Ph.D. Residency Opening Dinner/MLK Legacy Presentation. Her address is titled Generational Power? Intersectionality, Youth and Activism.

“Dr. Collins is a renowned sociologist whose theories resonate with the UI&U Ph.D. program themes of social justice and engaging difference. Her scholarship focuses on the intersection of knowledge and power; she argues how oppression is related to the marginalization of the knowledge of the wider public by a more powerful few,” said Dr. Michael A. Raffanti, dean of Union’s Ph.D. in Interdisciplinary Studies Program. “She also has theorized extensively on the concept of intersectionality, which centers on the interlocking nature of forms of oppression based on race, class, gender, and sexual orientation. This is an important concept for our students, who seek to understand and address systemic oppression in their scholarship and community work.”

Dr. Collins is Distinguished University Professor Emerita of Sociology at the University of Maryland, College Park, and Charles Phelps Taft Professor Emerita of Sociology within the Department of African American Studies at the University of Cincinnati.

She is an award-winning author and her books include Black Feminist Thought: Knowledge, Consciousness, and the Politics of Empowerment (1990, 2000) which received both the Jessie Bernard Award of the American Sociological Association (ASA) and the C. Wright Mills Award of the Society for the Study of Social Problems; and Black Sexual Politics: African Americans, Gender, and the New Racism (2004) which received ASA’s 2007 Distinguished Publication Award.

She is also author of Fighting Words: Black Women and the Search for Justice (1998); From Black Power to Hip Hop: Racism, Nationalism, and Feminism (2005); Another Kind of Public Education: Race, Schools, the Media, and Democratic Possibilities(2009); The Handbook of Race and Ethnic Studies (2010) edited with John Solomos; On Intellectual Activism (2013); Race, Class, and Gender: Intersections and Inequalities, 9th edition (2016), co-edited with Margaret Andersen; and Intersectionality (2016), co-authored with Sirma Bilge.

Professor Collins has taught at several institutions, held editorial positions with professional journals, lectured widely in the United States and internationally, has acted as consultant for a number of community organizations and served in many capacities in professional organizations.

In 2008, she became American Sociological Association’s (ASA) 100th president, the first African American woman elected to this position in the organization’s 104-year history. In 2017, she was the recipient of ASA’s William E. B. Du Bois Career of Distinguished Scholarship Award, and in 2018, she received the Joseph “Sandy” Himes Award for Lifetime Scholarship from the Association of Black Sociologists.

Her most recent book, Not Just Ideas: Intersectionality and Critical Social Theory is scheduled to be published by Duke University Press in 2019.

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